


Water

by Heather



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Other, Stalker, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-28
Updated: 2007-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-08 03:48:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather





	Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fodian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fodian/gifts).



  
He wonders if it's because it's wrong that he enjoys it so much--if some part of him thrives on wrongdoing and evil, some part of him that is unchangeably demonic. But at the same time, he _does_ enjoy it, and that eradicates most of his doubts. Until the next time.

Fred's body is easy for him to make out, even amongst the strange shapes the glass makes. She never runs the water very hot, so there is always very little steam. She curves and twists under the water, arching her back like a cat so that the drops will slide over the back of her neck and down the ridges of her spine. Connor has watched this many times. She has never noticed him. He walks barefooted in the hotel most of the time, curving his feet with care to the wood so as not to make a sound. It's a habit he's had too long to break.

She can't sense him when he does that. Her hearing's not as good as his, or her sense of smell. But even if it was, he's pretty sure she wouldn't try. She smiles at him when Gunn won't, puts her arms around him both when she's happy and when she's worried. She never gets mad when she realizes he's been behind her forever and she didn't hear him walk up; just startles, then laughs. Asks him to make more noise next time. She's never been afraid that he'd do anything to hurt her. She trusts him not to.

She always keeps her eyes closed when she bathes, as if she's afraid to look at herself, at what life in another world has left her with. She is very small--tiny and bird-boned, thinner even than he is--and she hates it; she always looks in the mirror, sighs and grumbles that she looks like a toothpick. He tells her every time that she's wrong; a part of him even gets angry at her for it. He hasn't known very many women, but to him, she's the most beautiful woman in the world. The faces she makes at her reflection and the way she complains about herself reminds him that he's an outsider and doesn't see things the way she does. It makes his temper creep up like a hungry beast and gnaw at him slowly: _You can't see what she sees. You don't know. You don't understand. You never will._

He hates feeling like that just for thinking that she's beautiful.

There is a place on one of her hips where the bone pokes out more than any other bone on her body. It's a place where the bone has broken and healed wrong, because it wasn't mended properly; Connor remembers the same warps on his father's body. On the small of her back is a shining white scar, like a burn. It looks to Connor like it might have a shape to it, as if it were done to her on purpose, but she is never still enough for him to see it clearly through the glass. He wonders what it's of, who did it to her. But she is like him; she keeps her secrets. He's not even sure she would answer if he asked, because her trust has limits. He hates that--he doesn't think he'd use the knowledge to hurt her--but he admires it, too. She's careful, so careful, to protect herself. It's a trait they share. He feels distant and close to her at the same time knowing that. She's still like him, even if there are places she won't let him into.

He thinks sometimes that she might be more beautiful to him because of these flaws, and many times he has wanted to strip his clothes off and climb in behind her. He wants to see if she will open her eyes and smile at him. To see if she will let him touch the scarred places, even if she will never talk about them. He knows, though, that she'd be frightened, that she might even scream. He's heard her scream before when she's scared. He hates that sound. It makes him want to kill things--jump up, fight back, protect. He has no idea what he'd do if she set off that reflex and he had nothing to fight. He might hit her out of fear. Or maybe run away and never come back. That idea seems more likely, and the thought that he would have to run because he did something stupid makes him feel sick and ashamed, even though it hasn't actually happened. The thought that he'd never see her again and his last image of her would be naked and small, crying out and cringing away from him...it's almost like pain.

So he stays where he is. The only time she lets him draw near when she is so naked and vulnerable is when she takes the towel to her hair after she's wrapped herself in a robe. He appreciates that intimacy, though he'll never say it. It's like his fear of her scream. He wouldn't know what to do if she did anything other than smile. He fears what he _might_ do if he suddenly had to find out.

She held him once, though, when she was clothed like that. It was the day with the water.

The rain outside had come down, the first time he had ever seen it do so on Earth, and he was simultaneously fascinated and frightened by it. Things that came from the sky in Quor Toth were often beautiful, but never safe. He remembered his father talking about Earth rain, how different it was, how clean and good, but he felt paralyzed in the face of its reality.

He remembers...he put his fingers up against the window. Not out into the water, never out into the water. He'd touched Earth water before, of course, and he knew it didn't burn. But he'd never seen it fall out of the _sky_ before. It seemed such a childish thing to be scared of; he knew water came from the sky. He'd been told, many times, but when he'd heard the stories, he told himself that if he would ever see the rain, he wanted to see it with his father. His father wasn't there. He couldn't walk out into the storm with him, and show Connor it was safe.

And the rain was so _different_ from anything he could remember seeing. It had made the window so cold. The pads of his fingers grew numb from it against the glass, and he couldn't remember if his father had ever told him that rain could be that cold. It was just another thing he didn't know, another thing he had no one to explain to him, and he didn't know if he was safe, didn't know what to do.

His father was dead and the only people around him took it all for granted as normal. He was alone, ignorant. He was scared of _rain._

He tore out of the room as fast as he could, angry and lonely and stupidly helpless. He looked for the only reassurance he'd ever been taught: the safety of numbers. Gunn wasn't there, but Fred's door was still open, and he could hear her inside. He didn't remember to knock. She jumped back in fear when the door flung open the rest of the way, started to scold--"Oh, my gosh; Connor, you scared the daylights out of me, you're supposed to--"

But then she saw his face and the way he was trembling. She had put her hand on his shoulder and looked at his eyes. Even though he could hear her heart beating like a rabbit's, startled as she was by his coming into her room, she hadn't said another word about it. She smiled at him with warm concern, wrapped her arms around his neck and guided him over to her bed. She sat down on the edge, pulling him with her, then drew him into her arms. She whispered things like "Oh, sweetie" and "It's okay" as she cradled his head to her breast and stroked his hair. He could tell that she knew he was humiliated by his fear, because she never even asked him why he was crying.

He felt something lonely and hungry inside him break. He hadn't even known until that moment that part of him existed. It flooded his mind with deeply sinful thoughts. It burned his body with a sort of desperate fever to be able to call her his.

She's like him and there's nobody else like him on Earth. He knows it and she knows it. She's even told him so. Her fingertips were warm and damp on the back of his neck. The fingers of her other hand stroked along his face, wiping off the tears, and he was painfully aware of her touch. He was painfully aware of her _being._ She was all soft skin and sharp angles, and unlike everyone else, she wasn't afraid to _touch_ him. Touch like this was still strange and rare. His father and Gunn communicated to him through short touches, light punches to the shoulder, pats on the cheek, handshakes and brief claps against his back. Fred's the only one who's ever touched him with her body. Her heart pounded against his cheek and a 'v' of bare skin was pushed against his nose, letting him get to know her scent. He could feel her through the robe and wanted to push it aside. He wanted to feel her for real, lay his skin against hers. He wanted to sink into every secret part of her body and be held fast and safe forever.

He watches her scrub herself under the water and thinks he might love her. But he can't really say for sure. He was always taught that love is trust,

_("Trust me, Steven." His father always whispered, before he explained why it was right. His father always did the right thing and he always knew that whatever happened to him would be right, too. There's a safety in that. His father taught him that being right was the only way to protect his soul.)_

and he can never truly trust her, even though they share the same darkness, even though they bear similar scars--not the kind he aches to touch on her body. The kind that motivates him to climb under the table with her when the man from down the street brings them food. They only do it when it's just the two of them there. Gunn makes them sit at the counter.

He likes those moments almost as much as he likes the ones he spends huddled outside the bathroom, watching her through the inch-wide crack in the door, though for distinctly different reasons. The pleasure that watching her brings is...prurient was the word his father always used. He's never been sure what that word means, but it sounds bad. The moments when they eat alone together, in safety and shadow, just out of sight, don't feel prurient; they feel companionable. They feel like love and home.

_(Fred always lets him eat first and she always shares her own food with him if he's still hungry. She asks about his day, about his thoughts. She tells him about hers. The talks may not be of demons in the wood, or the new plant that the sluks won't touch, but they still touch a part of him that misses having someone to listen to, who will hear him out in return.)_

There is one part of her cleansing ritual during which Fred opens her eyes. It's when she takes the razor off the soapdish

_ (she was the one to explain razors to him, to buy him one and educate him in its use, smiling at his trust when he let her put the tiny blade to his neck) _

and bends to put it to her legs. She's intent and careful on her work as she scrapes the metal along her skin, but she's not always careful enough, and he hates himself for liking it when she does it wrong and the tiny lines of blood well along her knees and trickle down her calves. Her blood smells different than his. He wonders: Does she smell different because her blood is more human than his?

He likes better the idea he came up with weeks ago, after the first time he turned his thoughts towards this confusing fact, when he thought that perhaps the difference is not in their degrees of humanity, but in the amount of Hell they've each absorbed.

_(The different Hells. His world was nothing like hers.)_

Perhaps the smell of her blood--and by proxy, the rest of her, (always so clean and so warm; even when he doesn't inhale her scent when they touch or sit close, he breathes it in her room and in her clothes; he goes in there sometimes and he has one of her shirts hidden under his bed) though in a less insistent way than that of an open wound--is just because she was tainted by a different nightmare.

_(Fred always calls their worlds "nightmares." His father always said that, too.)_

He jerks back from the door at the screech of metal as Fred turns the taps to turn off the water. She shrugs the wet hair off her shoulders and starts to open the door and reach for a towel at the same time. He watches for only a few seconds longer, catching an unimpeded view of the length of her arm and the shape of one of her small breasts, the exact color of one nipple, before he backs away and silently exits the room.

He feels that impulse again--strip her, touch her, put his body on hers. Wrap himself in Fred and learn just a little bit more how to love someone that's marked like him--

But Connor can't let himself love her, because he can't let himself trust her. There is much about him that she does not know, can never know. Can't know he loved his father and that he never really managed to hate Quor Toth. Can't know he's lying to her, all the time. Even just by answering to the name Angelus gave him, he's telling her a lie.

He can't love her because she doesn't love him. She doesn't know enough about him to love.

He's determined that she never will.


End file.
